Slashdot Mirror

Read about a "basic income" , a "gift economy", a "planned economy", and "local subsistence" for ideas about alternative ways of organizing economies. A whole book on that:
"The dictionary of alternatives: utopianism and organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC

Other ideas:
http://www.altruists.org/ideas/society/abundance_or_scarcity/
"The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking. (Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967))"

I want to believe I have a place in society, but if it's a society of cookie-cutter people, then I may not.

I suggest you check out John Taylor Gatto's material if you haven't already. It will help explain the origin and implementation of the "cookie-cutter" society, although I don't think he uses that term.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/
Also audio downloads of some of his speeches :http://www.altruists.org/downloads/search/?restype=0&rescategory=0&resauthors=John+Taylor+Gatto&restitle=Enter+Keyword

I doubt that school is for you. I doubt school as implemented in our society is for students at all, although that is more obvious with some people than others. (For those of you who liked school, that's not my point, for those of you who are teachers, you don't control the implementation and I'm not insulting your character)

Hope you get something out of it. Maybe even inspiration for your search to find a place in society.

Public school in the United States is poorly designed to accomplish any goal other than "keep kids off the street and pay a bunch of bureaucrats salaries".

You are quite wrong. The US population used to be approx 90% people having independent livelyhood, now most people work for a corporation. The public school system is designed to extend the age of childhool well beyond natural limits and produce a dependent population that will take orders in a job without demanding too much in the way of compensation.

The public school system achieves this goal in exceptional fashion, and is very successful.

Sites to check out: http://johntaylorgatto.com/
http://www.altruists.org/downloads/by_subject/othe rs/education/

I fail to see how "pay us and we won't crush you" qualifies as 'doing something good.'

From the very first report issued by John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board -- this is their first mission statement: "In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk." Source http://www.altruists.org/static/files/Shocking%20O rigins%20of%20Public%20Education%20(John%20Taylor% 20Gatto).htm

s/John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board/Microsoft/

You shall pay for your lack of vision - Darth Ballmer

"LEAVE THE FUCKING BASEMENT!"

I know this was meant to be funny, but to be serious for a moment. Those who still live in the basement have more serious issues beyond WoW my friend, clinical depression and possible abuse being one of them.

The psychological rewards caused by natural selection can be ruined if a minimum of some of maslow's hierarchy of needs cannot be maintained. Because some serious exterinal or biological factors interfere with social and occupational functioning, causing unnatural stress and agitation on a persons nerves to the degree the wish to cease to exist to escape the cage constant stress and agitation they find themselves in. "Depression" does not in any way capture what a clinically depressed person physically feels. Anyone interested in understanding some of the evolutionary aspects of depression better can go here - http://biology.unm.edu/Biology/pwatson/public_html /dp1.htm

I've experienced clinical depression all my life, I shit you not, it's not a fun thing to know that for your entire life you do not experience life like everyone else, you do not enjoy things other people enjoy, and even the things you should enjoy... eating, sex, social life, company, take a back seat when you are clinically depressed.

The below is taken from Altruists.org :

Is Depression (i.e. and its consequences like addiction, etc) a Healthy reaction to a Sick Society?

"To demand that our children feel well in the world which we leave them is an insult to their dignity." Ivan Illich

The World Health Organisation defines depression as a 'disorder that presents with depressed mood, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy, and poor concentration'. It declares that it is the leading cause of disability, worldwide, and by 2020 it will be the second most important disease worldwide.

WHO goes on to say that in most cases, drugs are an effective treatment. This reflects a materialistic worldview that focusses on symptoms, not root causes. A multinational drug company has claimed that "depression is caused by an imbalance of brain chemicals", but this fails to explain why it is more widespread than ever before, (9.5% of US adults suffer from a depressive disorder in any one year) and why it is still spreading. Depression is not just another disease. If it is not caused by pathogens, how can it spread?

Maslow's hierarchy of needs predicts that if securely fed and housed, people's well-being depends less on material goods, more on factors such as good relationships with and love of others. However, most people are in the thrall of an economic system that ignores this fact, punishes generosity but rewards unnatural selfishness. This results in cognitive dissonance, because people feel forced to do things of which they disapprove, leaving them feeling guilty, disempowered and depressed. This would seem to explain why depression is booming even amidst materially prospering populations. Although a human tragedy, this epidemic of depression is a boon for the economy, since consumer culture feeds off people's low self-esteem by encouraging self-indulgence and escapism, resulting in a vicious circle of increasing consumption and decreasing well-being.

We believe many depressive symptoms are a natural response of the mind to an unhealthy, unsustainable, diseased and generally distressed society. Many of those who dismiss it as being an 'illness' of the brain, are sadly mistaken, others cynically exploiting it for their own benefit. Among the chief causes are the priority given to the competitive money system which discourages healthy human relationships to the point where, starved of friendship, some people even question the validity of loving others. Altruism is a side-effect free, natural way to cope with depressive symptoms and to live a longer, healthier and happier life.

Check out these: https://www.billmonk.com/, http://ripple.sourceforge.net/, http://p2pay.net/ http://www.altruists.org/ideas/economics/altruisti c/ http://infoeng.sourceforge.net/

This sort of behavior is all too common in the computer industry. Consider spending more money to make a CPU less powerful or modifying a replacement hard drive to make less of its capacity available because you no longer make the smaller capacity drives but don't want to give the consumer a free upgrade when they need replacement parts. Crazy? It's happened before.

(Note: I'm not necessarily endorsing the views expressed on this site, only sharing the information.)

http://www.altruists.org/ideas/economics/problems/ profit_maximisation/

Reworking Copyright pretty much covers how I feel about copyright.. (though not written by me).

For example , Gandhi was a great proponent of "Making money is not evil" (being from a business community) unlike the England educated Nehru's socialism. People rarely distinguish between the cost of an object and it's price :).. As long as the price is not paid by society (rather than an induvidual) , copyright holds. Interestingly society profits when an induvidual pays or that's the way copyright was supposed to work.